Ubuntu Members and employees of Canonical have emblems next to their names, indicating their affliation. Members are distinguished by a small Ubuntu logo next to their names, Canonical employees by a purple "O", a portion of Canonical's logo.

But this blog looks very famous behind all other ubuntu blogs. does 'social sharing' is their key? maybe in part. But the author get incomes for doing this lovely hobby job. A choice he made, you like it or not. it's out of topic imho (but i agree with it)

There's a difference between donating... and purchasing something. In this case your money is put up to purchase a phone/computer. This in effect is no different to buying a laptop from a shop... other than that you have to wait several months for delivery here.

I get what you're aiming at, and I agree.. donate to help people is better, but this is NOT a pure donation.. it's a purchase... on layaway

OK- if it's simply a question of funding the project via pre-sales I retract. Had not investigated further after hearing of the pitch for "donations". In that case though, wonder why the characterization as "donations". I can see if the company is trying to market using the appeal to those attracted to the feel of community projects by using language that way, perhaps, but I bet many more are reflexively turned off by the notion of a for-profit project using that language. Sounds misleading and scammy, and I bet I'm not the only one who didn't look further. Nobody is going to mistake anything U* does, for all its charms, as a legitimate community type project.

I think the terminology comes down to not knowing quite how to describe what it is... you pay money now on a promise of a physical product later. It's not a downpayment, it's not really a pre-sale... well kind of. The terminology is usually pledge because you usually agree or pledge to pay X dollars/euros/whatever by a certain date if enougg other people agree.

They used the donations line to get around the indiegogo restriction on using the service for pre-orders. In their case, the pre-order rule was bent slightly, because there are fewer risks, and this is a one-of-a-kind campaign. I have no issues with how they did it, personally.

Yes, but officially it is not supposed to be, hence the argument from the top commenter in this thread that Multimillion $ companies should not be asking for donations. I am just pointing out that due to the nature of IGG they had to call it that. If IGG changed it to officially be called pre-orders, then people would get all shitty when they projects target isn't reached. The way it was done allowed Canonical to get proper committed preorders, (vs some mailing list thing that everyone would sign up to even if they couldn't afford the phone) and judge whether it would be worth building the phone at present. Clearly, right now it isn't, but in a few years it may well be.

It's not going to make it. At this point, it would need to sustain more than its first-day average pledge rate, for the rest of the campaign, to be able to make it. That's not going to happen, unless suddenly hundreds of businesses decide to get the $80,000 enterprise bundle. If it were closer to the goal, they could probably depend on a nice surge of interest at the end, as people realized that they're almost at the goal and just need a little more to go over. But at less than half of the total funds raised, it's just not going to happen.

I pledged back on the first day. I thought then that it could make it, as it was raising money faster than any crowdfunding campaign had ever done; but I didn't take into account just how much of that first-day fundraising was due to the low, limited time price and initial excitement. The pledge rate dropped off a cliff when that ran out.

The problem with me and probably with many others is that my phone and laptop are both quite recent. I like the concept but the timing just sucks. Window for the deal is just too short for what it is. Most people don't have the financial freedom to just throw themselves at deals like this, even if it's just what they have been waiting for.

There's a lot Canonical could have planned better with how Edge was presented. Make the project open like Ubuntu is supposed to be and build some hype over time. Let people discuss the project and really utilize the fanbase. Now it all just seems so rushed.

Edit: To add, it seems people are just now starting to understand the concept behind Edge. It's a lot more than phone, yet most people see it only as a phone with some fancy features, when instead Edge works as a single unifying device and for many people it makes owning seperate laptop obsolete.

well omg has all the reasons to promote it, as it definitely would benefit from the attention drawn to ubuntu by the project, so yeah it's more about the omg post but i'm prett sure canonical is involved in there.

ubuntu-edge is a nice project, but the goal was set too high, so nice tries like this won't help it much..

I contemplated purchasing a phone (because this is buying product, not charity), but then I tried the recent Ubuntu Touch builds. It's utter garbage. There's shit flipping in from the left, from the right, from the top, from the bottom, the browser does nothing, the apps do nothing, there are place holder images, and the whole UI just feels like a confusing mess. As far as I'm concerned, there is no Ubuntu Touch and it doesn't look like there will be any time soon. This would just end up being another Android phone for me.

My advice is to try again when they actually have a functional OS instead of a cobbled together mess.